“What sort of subjects did she paint?”

“Landscapes. Seascapes. She has a very individual style-more impressionist than representational-creates movement in the sky and the water with minimal paint and sweeping brushstrokes. It didn’t go down too well with her teachers, which is why she’s so intolerant of other people’s opinions. They told her she was looking back towards Turner instead of embracing the idea of conceptual art, where a piece is created in the mind before it becomes concrete. The sort of artist they liked was Madeleine’s husband.”

My disbelief must have been obvious, because Peter laughed.

“He used to be a lot more interesting than those canvases on Lily’s walls. He conceptualized irrationality in physical form…quite different from the abstracts he’s doing now.”

I tried to look intelligent. “Jess said you have one of his early paintings. Can I see it?”

There was a small hestitation. “Why not? It’s hanging in my office…second door on the right. You shouldn’t have any trouble identifying it. It’s the only painting in there.”

This picture was detailed and busy, like Hieronymus Bosch, with the same nightmarish visions of a world gone mad. Living houses thrust out massive roots with gnarled lianas burrowing through the brickwork. The painting had a high sheen, as if layer upon painstaking layer of paint had been applied to produce it, and the style bore no resemblance to the looser work at Barton House. There was a whirling madness at its heart. None of the houses stood true, but leaned drunkenly in all directions as if gripped by a hurricane. Hundreds of tiny people, quite out of scale with the buildings, populated the rooms behind the windows, and each face was a meticulous replica of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Outside, similarly tiny animals foraged among leaf matter, with no distinction in size made between species, all with the pale, tapered, human faces of the Munch.

I was prepared to accept that it was conceptualized irrationality (whatever that meant-it sounded like an oxymoron to me) but, without a title, I hadn’t a clue if a particular piece of unreason was being expressed or if it was unreason in general. Why living houses? Why so many people trapped inside them? Why animals with human faces? Was it man’s fear of nature? Or was it closer to Hieronymus Bosch-a vision of hell? I had an uncomfortable feeling that if Jess were there she’d say my opinion was subjective, and therefore irrelevant. It didn’t matter how disturbed and powerful I found the vision, the meaning belonged to the artist.

Peter was standing in front of the kettle when I returned to the kitchen. “I hope you like your coffee black,” he said, pouring water into two mugs. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of milk.”

“I do, thank you.” I took the one he offered me, successfully manoeuvring my fingers to avoid his. “Does the painting have a title?”

“It won’t help you. Ochre. What did you make of it?”

“Honestly? Or will you bite my head off like Jess? I felt her breathing down my neck in there, telling me not to be so pretentious.”

Peter looked amused. “Except she hates the thought police more than you do. She calls it the emperor’s-clothes syndrome. If someone like Saatchi’s prepared to pay a fortune for an unmade bed, then it must be good…and it’s only idiots who don’t get it. Try honesty,” he encouraged.

“OK, well, it’s a damn sight better than anything at Barton House, although I haven’t a clue what it’s supposed to represent. It has a surrealist feel to it. What I really can’t get my head around is how Madeleine lives with the artist who painted it. I mean, she’s so middle-class and conformist…and Nathaniel appears to be hovering off the planet somewhere. How does that work exactly?”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Nathaniel painted it before he married her. The stuff he does now is very tame. Jess describes it as marshmallow buildings with window-boxes. Which is about right. He hardly sells at all these days.”

“How much did you pay for yours?”

Peter pulled a face. “Five thousand quid eleven years ago, and it’s worth hardly anything now. I had it valued for the divorce. In terms of investment, it was a disaster…but, as a canvas, it still fascinates me. When I bought it, Nathaniel told me that the clue to what it represents is the repetitive Edvard Munch face-the angst-filled scream.”

I waited. “OK,” I said after a moment. “I recognized it in the faces…but it doesn’t help me much. Is it hell?”

“In a way.” He paused. “I thought you might recognize the emotions. It depicts a panic attack. Munch suffered anxiety most of his life and The Scream is usually described as an expression of intense anguish or fear.”

I lifted a wry eyebrow.

“You didn’t see that?”

“Not really. Why are the houses alive? Why make them unstable? I thought agoraphobics saw them as places of safety. And why put human faces on the animals? Animals don’t suffer anxiety…or not to the extent that humans do.”

“I don’t think you can apply logic to it, Marianne. Panic’s an irrational response.”

The “Marianne” caught me off-guard as usual. I still thought of it as my mother’s name and did a mouth-dropping double-take whenever it was used. I think it was on the tip of Peter’s tongue to admit he knew who I really was but I spoke before he could. “He can’t have painted it during an attack…it’s too detailed and meticulous. At the very least, his hands would have been shaking.”

Peter shrugged. “Who says it was his panic attack? Perhaps he witnessed someone else’s.”

“Whose?”

Another shrug.

“Not Madeleine’s,” I said in disbelief. “She doesn’t have the imagination to worry herself into a box. In any case, if she was his inspiration, wouldn’t he still be painting like that?”

“I don’t know what his themes are now. Madeleine talks about abstract reflections on the human condition…but I don’t know if that’s her or Nathaniel speaking. Whichever, it’s a fairly desperate spin to make up for a spectacular loss of talent. He makes a living from teaching at the moment.”

“How old is he?”

“Mid-thirties. He was twenty-four when he painted the picture I have.”

“And Madeleine’s what? Thirty-nine…forty? When did they marry?”

“Ninety-four.”

Ten years ago. I did a few sums in my head. “Which makes him a bit of a toy-boy. Perhaps she’s not as conventional as I thought. Jess said she has an eleven-year-old son. Is Nathaniel his father?”

“As far as I know. They married a few months after he was born.”

“What did Lily think about that?”

“Exactly what you’d expect,” Peter said with a smile.

“She’d have preferred a wedding and grandchildren in the correct order?”

He nodded.

“Most mothers would.” I gave a rueful shake of my head. “It just shows how wrong you can be about people. I’d have put money on Madeleine marrying a rich older man and popping her baby out after a respectable nine months. So where did she and Nathaniel meet? I don’t get the feeling she’s been hanging around art exhibitions all her life.”

“Here,” said Peter dryly, tapping the floor with his foot. “About where you’re standing. I was having a chat with Nathaniel when Madeleine turned up. He didn’t stand a chance once she found out who he was, although I don’t know what he saw in her…unless it was undiluted admiration. She couldn’t tell one end of a paintbrush from the other, but she certainly knew how to flatter him.”

Once she found out who he was…? “Did he live in Winterbourne Barton?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

Peter stared into his coffee. “Work it out for yourself-it’s hardly quantum mechanics.”

I must have been extraordinarily dense, because I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“Hippocratic oath,” he said with a good-humoured grin. “I’d lose patients if I couldn’t keep a still tongue in my head…particularly in a place like this where gossip spreads like wildfire. In any case, life’s too short to fight other people’s wars.”